grew up in Laufen, Germany, a small town on the Austrian-Bavarian border. At the age of 19, she lived in Bangladesh for almost a year, where she had the chance to learn about sustainable development work from the NGO Dipshikha. The most important lesson was learning that the most successful development strategy is to rely on existing, readily available resources and make the most of them, rather than depending on external systems. Eight years later, in 2005, she tried to apply this philosophy to the field of architecture.
For Anna Heringer, architecture is a tool for improving lives. As an architect and honorary professor of the UNESCO Chair of Earth Building, Building Cultures and Sustainable Development, she is concerned with the use of natural building materials. She has been actively involved in development cooperation in Bangladesh since 1997. Her diploma thesis, the METI School in Rudrapur, was realized in 2005 in collaboration with Eike Roswag and won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2007. Over the years Anna Heringer has realized further projects in Asia, Africa and Europe. Together with Martin Rauch, she developed the Clay Storming method, which she teaches at various universities, including ETH Zurich, UP Madrid, TU Munich and GSD/Harvard.
She has received numerous awards: the Obel Award 2020, the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture, the AR Emerging Architecture Awards in 2006 and 2008, the Loeb Fellowship at the GSD in Harvard, and a RIBA International Fellowship. Her work has been widely published and exhibited at MoMA New York, the V&A Museum in London, and the Venice Biennale, among others. In 2013, together with Andres Lepik and Hubert Klumpner, she initiated the Laufen Manifesto, in which practitioners and academics from around the world helped define guidelines for a humane design culture. In 2017, she was invited to give a TED talk.
